When the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced at a press conference on Tuesday morning, even I was surprised by how happy it made me. The room was full of hardened news reporters. I stood at the back – which was just as well, because when all six names had been read out I felt an actual tear of joy in my eye.

I sent out a tweet: “Best Booker short list in living memory: NoViolet Bulawayo, Jim Crace, Eleanor Catton, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki, Colm Toibin”. There was one almost instant reply: “Really? What about 2004: The Line of Beauty, Cloud Atlas, The Master?” Well, maybe my memory’s not what it might be, or my idea of living debatable, but I take none of it back. This is, to my mind and my memory, a truly great shortlist.

The tear, I suppose, was due to the fact that I know how difficult it is to get these things right. I was a member of a much-maligned Man Booker jury two years ago. When such lists are announced, many people voice an opinion, but few of those people have read the 140-plus novels that have threatened to blur the judges’ minds, nor have they been engaged in the discussions.

This year, I had guessed at the books I thought would make the shortlist. In retrospect my bet seems a little cynical – at least half of my suspects were books I thought were probable but not all that exciting (from, it should be said, an excellent long list). I made a separate mental list of books I’d like to see there but I was sure wouldn’t make it. A number of them, perhaps, had been included on the long list for variety but that was as far as they’d get: Eleanor Catton – too long? Colm Toibin – too short? NoViolet Bulawayo – too strange? Ozeki, Catton, Bulawayo, Lahiri – all, in some way, too “foreign”? But as the names were read out by Robert Macfarlane, chair of the judges, I realised the choices were both brave and solid – each one exceptional yet indisputably skilled; and as a collection, as a joint way of saying “this is what the novel can be”, it was incredibly exciting.

The list be broken down in various ways: the length of the books ranges from 101 pages to over 800; there are four women and two men; the geographical range of the subject matter is vast. In this latter respect, it resembles Granta’s recent list of Best Young British Novelists more than other Man Booker lists. For those who are surprised by this aspect, and prone to worry about whether that makes the prize “British”, think of it the other way around: we have embraced the world, not been conquered or usurped by it. It’s reminiscent of Gloria Steinem’s famous reply to the man who said she didn’t look forty: “This is what forty looks like”. The Man Booker Prize is open to novelists from Britain, the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe, and that’s exactly what this list looks like.

The gender issue seems relatively uninteresting to me, except to the extent that it allows one to hope it will no longer be an issue. Length: also quite a dull subject – anyone who is not making up at least some of the rules is surely not really writing a novel. But the question of language and form in these books is fascinating – the broken down, rhythmic sentences of Bulawayo’s slum-dwelling Zimbabwean child; the plainness of Lahiri’s prose against the colour of her setting and drama of her events; what you might call Toibin and Catton’s “translations”, in the literal sense – shifts that are a literary equivalent of time travel, so that you are viewing the life of Jesus’s mother, or the adventures of a 19th-century New Zealand golddigger, in some new way.

“We were drawn to novels that sought to extend the possibilities of the form,” Macfarlane said, “we wanted novel novels”. Both he and another jury member, the literary critic Stuart Kelly, spoke about the nature of experimentation. “What is this?” they asked themselves when confronted with Catton’s ingenious structure, “and we realised it was trying to be only itself”. “Experimentation can be calm,” Macfarlane continued, “Lahiri builds her effects through patience.” Kelly added that “we tend to think of experimentation as exuberant and ebullient. But it doesn’t have to be in the American Pynchon-esque tradition. You can approach the avant-garde from any direction”.

One thing struck me later: only one novelist on the list lives permanently in Britain (Jim Crace). It’s not that the others have fled – they live elsewhere because, well, they just do – but it occurred to me that we could ask ourselves whether Britain is particularly congenial to writers. These are our best authors, yet they have not made their homes here. If Britain were an American university, we would be begging them to come and live within these shores. Everyone knows that book advances are dwindling: are we replacing those with grants or scholarships? There are increasing numbers of creative writing courses here; we take people’s money and teach them how to write – so many want to learn – but do we support them later on? Can we help writers buy themselves time? Other countries, it seems, are better at this.